Self-Promotion & Timeless Abstractions

LTF & the General Strike

During the autumn 2010 mass protests against French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s
attack on pensions, many of the more class-conscious workers favored the idea of
escalating the struggle into a general strike to force the government to withdraw its
“reform.” In such situations, the job of revolutionaries is to propose how the
sabotage of the class-collaborationist union leaders can be overcome—in this case
through strike committees elected in workplace general assemblies and linked by delegated
coordinations interprofessionnelles at the local, regional and national levels.

The Ligue trotskyste de France (LTF—French affiliate of the International
Communist League [ICL] headed by the Spartacist League/U.S.), however, refused to call for
a general strike. In its propaganda the ICL noted that the isolated “days of
action,” initiated by the labor bureaucrats, “were largely staggered according
to the rhythm of the parliamentary debate on the pension ‘reform’ bill...with
the aim of wringing some concessions on the wording of the law” (Workers
Vanguard, 5 November 2010, translated in Le Bolchévik, December
2010):

“In the face of Sarkozy’s determined attack on pensions, many
militant workers clearly understood that isolated ‘days of action’ were not
sufficient. Small locally based and generally brief initiatives mushroomed, including by
rail workers, like an anarchic ferment lacking a plan. However, unlike December 1995, when
rail and transit workers were in the vanguard of the struggle that effectively spelled the
end of the right-wing government of Jacques Chirac/Alain Juppé by shutting down
public transportation for over three weeks, the situation today is far more difficult for
railroad workers.”

It is true that many militants who knew that the “isolated ‘days of
action’ were not sufficient” were “lacking a plan,” or at least a
sufficiently concrete one, for connecting up and spreading the local pockets of
“anarchic ferment.” The task of revolutionaries was precisely to sketch out
how to do this, i.e., how to go about organizing a general strike from the bottom up. The
LTF called for “real strikes to shut down production” (Le
Bolchévik, September 2010), but failed to provide any hints about how such
labor actions could be initiated, coordinated or defended.

The ICL’s opposition to calling for a general strike is long-standing. Their
position is that such a call should not be advanced prior to the establishment of a
hegemonic, mass revolutionary party capable of seizing power (see “In Defense of Tactics,” 1917 No.20,
1998). But this gets things backward:

“The masses want a general strike. The bureaucrats are afraid to
initiate one. In this circumstance, the call for a general strike can both expose the
bureaucrats’ cowardice and demonstrate to militant workers (who may even be
anti-communist) that, at least on this one question, the communists are right against
their existing leaders. This is the only way that revolutionaries can begin the
struggle to ‘politically defeat and replace’ the misleaders.”—“Resistance &
Betrayal,” 1917 No.19, 1997

While criticizing the union leadership, the LTF’s position, in practice, was no
better than that of Lutte ouvrière and other leftists who tailed the bureaucrats.
The LTF claimed that “In our interventions in the recent strike movement, as in all
our work, the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League,
has sought to reassert the revolutionary program of Bolshevism and the liberating ideals
of communism” (Workers Vanguard, 5 November 2010). In fact, the LTF/ICL
offered only self-promotion and timeless abstractions. Those who really seek to represent
the “revolutionary program of Bolshevism” have a duty to outline the steps
necessary for the workers to win.